My Dick Is Literally a Work of Art

I had Swedish designers turn my dick measurements into a ‘Penis Poster’ — and learned a ton about the history of dick sculptures, paintings and pics in the process

I’m debating whether or not to frame the life-size artistic rendering of my erect penis that’s just arrived in the mail. I commissioned it a couple months ago from a group of designers in Gothenburg, Sweden, to whom I sent the basic specs of my dick (i.e., length, girth, grower v. shower, intact vs. circumcised, etc.); desired state (erect vs. flaccid); and preferred design (watercolor, line art or sketch). As I’m a huge fan of both M.C. Escher and my own boner, I opt for a circumcised pencil sketch of what a Swedish stranger imagines my hard-on looks like.

The Penis Poster — like György Szűcs’ Dick Code before it, which I’ve written about on a couple of different occasions — was inspired by the #MeToo movement, Calderon explains. “I didn’t realize so many women had received unwanted pictures of penises,” he admits. “I thought, If you’re so proud of it, why don’t you frame it and put it on a wall?” (His proposition for men, while admittedly dubious, is essentially to hang their willies on the wall instead of texting them, willy-nilly.)

It’s sorta worked. To date, 2,560 Penis Posters have been sold (at $49 each plus $15 international shipping), the proceeds of which are donated to the U.N. gender equality initiative HeForShe. “The more we sell, the better,” Calderon adds, since his primary goal is to start conversations, raise awareness and change problematic behavior. Case in point: The final step of the Penis Poster buying process requires checking a box and agreeing you “won’t be a douche and send unsolicited dick pics.”

That’s all well and good — I left the dick pic game behind long ago — but what am I to do with this life-sized sketch of my erection? What’s the etiquette on hanging something like that in my living room? For answers, I asked my Facebook friends how they’d react if they were greeted by a life-sized sketch of my dong in my living room. “That’s a hard one to call,” chimes my pal Stuart, an acerbic Brit, plucking some low-hanging pun fruit. “I’d ask for proof it’s yours and then never leave,” admits Shannon, my male gay friend from college. In fact, “Request for corroborating proof,” was a common refrain among my gay brethren.

On the other end of the equation, my brother’s business school classmate Chip says without hesitation: “I’d stop bringing my children to your house.” This opinion — that framed genitalia must come down (again, pun intended) in the presence of minors — was generally agreed upon. For example, my former writing colleague Jenn, hardly a prude, rightly notes that in this day and age “it’s not a great idea to frame a picture of your cock, artist’s rendering or otherwise, in an area where children, women, family members, co-workers and others could possibly be caught off-guard.”

Still, hers was far from a universal reaction. “Why on earth would people be offended?” wonders Joy, a veteran film producer who came of age during the sexual revolution. “Certainly every museum in the world depicts nudity.” “Do we not go to Italy to see Michelangelo’s David,” agrees Sionainn, an old friend from Connecticut, “or covet any other historic nude paintings as collectors do?”

Good point.

So good in fact that it sent me down a historical wormhole of the phallic art that led to my penis poster.

Like the Penis Poster, the ancient appendage was accompanied by an inscription of the owner, in this case a guy was named “Dion.” Nearby, an equally steamy bit of graffiti from the mid-sixth century B.C. reads. “Nικασίτιμος οἶφε Τιμίονα,” or “Nikasitimos was here mounting Timiona.” The Greeks presumably got off on posting dick pics (upon granite pillars); the Temple of Dionysus, for example, features giant stone penises carved in the third century B.C.

The Middle-Aged Dick

Penises show up in several medieval manuscripts, from flying green penis monsters to sun-ripened penises dangling from penis-laden tree branches. When Sarah Peverley, a senior lecturer in the University of Liverpool’s School of English, tweeted an image from a French manuscript showing nuns picking “fruit” from “a medieval penis tree,” a male follower aptly noted the penises “look pretty much like those I drew on my high school math book, c.1995.” Peverley noted the penis tree was from a 14th-century manuscript of the Romance of the Rose, a popular medieval French-language poem — and the image was drawn by a woman.

Similarly, wander aimlessly around the Erdene Zuu Monastery, the oldest Buddhist monastery in Mongolia (est. 1585),and you might stumble upon a giant decapitated dong. As the legend goes, a monk who had vowed to be celibate turned out to be a womanizer and was castrated to remind him of his vows of celibacy. As a warning to other monks at the monastery, a rock in the shape of a penis was prominently engraved as a stone phallus called “Kharkhorin Rock.”

Kharkhorin Rock — Kharkhorin, Mongolia

Sixteenth century phallic art also featured ceramic dicks. Or rather a ceramic dish emblazoned with a human head composed of dicks. The earring and hairband denote femininity and the inscription, written in Italian, translates to, “Every man looks at me as if I were a head of dicks.”

The Modern and Post-Modern Dick

Also satirically, in 1920, Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi was asked by French Princess Marie Bonaparte to carve a sculpture of her. “She had a beautiful bust,” Brancusi noted, “but ugly legs and was terribly vain. She was looking in the mirror all the time, even during lunch, discreetly placing the mirror on the table, looking furtive.” His creation, “Princess X,” depicted just that, featuring a slightly inclined ovoid head and a long neck terminating in a set of giant tits. But when Picasso saw Princess X on display in Paris he exclaimed, “Here it is: the phallus!”

The most notable mid-century modern penis art belongs to Dutch sculptor Herman Makkink. The “Rocking Machine,” featured in A Clockwork Orange, combines a phallus with a round female bottom. “Pop Art was in full swing and so was the sexual revolution,” Makkink explained, “so I combined a penis with a beautifully shaped female rear in fiberglass. I thought this would be really shocking.”

C. Brian Smith writes hard-hitting gonzo features for MEL, whether it be training with a masturbation coach, receiving psycho corporal treatment from a spank therapist, or embarking on a week-long pleasure cruise with 75 Santa Clauses following their busy season.